I stared at her. The record ended. In the silence I felt as though I were slipping down the sides of the earth. “Tell me Grady killed his father.”
“Why do you want to believe that?”
“I don’t want to think the killer is somebody who wants us dead, too.”
“I don’t know what Grady did. He was here a few hours before his father died. His friends say he was on a sailboat that evening, when Mr. Harrelson was killed. Grady is probably telling the truth.”
“Let’s go to Mexico.”
“And do what?”
“Get married.”
“You need to go to college.”
“What for?”
“To be a writer.”
“I’ll be a writer and your husband. Let’s go upstairs.”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Can we do it another time?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied.
“You don’t mind?”
I shook my head. “It’s not because of me, is it?”
“No, never.”
But I wasn’t convinced.
VALERIE CALLED ME at seven P.M. Her father had just gotten home and was in the shower.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
“He said all this is going to pass.”
“What is he? Some kind of Tibetan holy man?”
“That’s not very respectful.”
I paused, trying to suppress my anger. “Want to go out for some ice cream? The sun doesn’t set until after nine.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Then I guess I’ll say good night.”
“It’s still evening.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said.
IN THE MORNING I looked through the newspaper for stories about violence, bodies discovered in a ditch, a shooting by an unknown assailant at a business property owned by the Atlas family. There was nothing I might link to Mr. Epstein.
My mother’s greatest fear was that someone would look at her and see an impoverished little girl standing barefoot by herself in front of a house that was hardly more than a shack.
I was in the backyard when I heard her come home early from work. Through the kitchen window, I saw her trying to boil water to make tea, the pot shaking in her hand. I went inside, closing the door carefully. “You all right, Mother?”
“I had a dizzy spell at work,” she said. “I think I ate some tainted food.” Her vocabulary for depression and her justifications for the pharmaceuticals were endless. Her contradictions were also. She was physically brave and did not fear disease, mortality, or notions about perdition. She believed most men were meretricious by nature, yet these were the same avuncular men who usually ended up victimizing her.
“Sit down. I’ll fix that for you.”
“Thank you, Aaron. You’re such a good boy. I left that salad too long in the icebox. I’m sure that was it. This man came in. He was from San Angelo. He wanted to open an account. I told him that wasn’t one of my duties. He seemed to pay no attention to what I told him. He insisted he knew me.” She was sitting at the table now, looking into space as though speaking to herself. “He used my childhood nickname with a smirk on his face,” she said. “He told me who my brothers were, as though I didn’t know their names. I told him to please go to Mr. Benbow’s desk and open his account. I told him I didn’t appreciate his presumption. Then I went into the lunchroom and ate that salad even though it had a funny taste. I’m so distressed and angry at myself. I’m sorry to bother you with this, Aaron. I just get so confused.”
“He’s just one of those worthless fellows we have to forget about,” I said.
“That is exactly what he is. There is nothing lower than that kind of white man. They abuse Negroes and use social situations to let their eyes linger on a woman’s person. They’re common and coarse and invasive and enjoy humiliating the defenseless. Sometimes I want to do violent things to them. I really do.” She was knotting her hands, the nails leaving tiny half-moons on the heel. “Would you take me to Mrs. Ludiki’s house? I need to order my thoughts. I don’t know why I allowed myself to be upset by this common, rude man.”
She had never learned to drive. In my opinion, Mrs. Ludiki was a curse; she was a fortune-teller raised in the caves outside Granada who spoke a dialect she called gitano. She lived in a small paintless frame house surrounded by persimmon and pomegranate trees that left rotting fruit all over the lawn. I didn’t believe she was a confidence woman, nor did I believe she practiced black arts. It was the other way around. I believed she had a natural insight into people and their propensities, and her “readings” were foregone conclusions about a person’s behavior. The problem was the credulity and desperation of my mother. Mrs. Ludiki listened and gave warnings that grew not out of the zodiac but out of my mother’s emotional and mental illness.
I didn’t argue, though. There were worse people than Mrs. Ludiki. She had hair like a porcupine that she tried to mash down under a bandana, and she wore so many gold chains and glass necklaces and so much hooped jewelry that she rattled when she walked. Her “reading room” was a gas chamber of incense and perfumed candles. The centerpiece was her deck of tarot cards; the iconography had its origins in Egypt and Byzantium and the legends of Crusader knights seeking the Grail. The deck was a pictorial history of the Western world’s cultural debt to the Middle East.
My mother’s conversations with Mrs. Ludiki were always circuitous. She could not bring herself to say she was afraid; she could not admit her addiction to pharmaceuticals; she could not admit that she was forced to quit high school in the tenth grade and go to work, nor that she had married a man much older than she when she was seventeen, as though poverty and loneliness and desperation were unacceptable in the sight of the Creator.
“I’ve felt terribly out of sorts,” she said to Mrs. Ludiki. “Nothing on a grand scale, of course. Like this morning at the bank. A man was discourteous and kept insisting he knew me when he didn’t. Actually, it doesn’t bother me. I’m quite all right now, except for a mild case of food poisoning. How have you been, Mrs. Ludiki?”
“I think we can get to the root of these problems quickly, Mrs. Broussard,” Mrs. Ludiki said, laying out the tarot cards in a wheel. “Look. There’s the man carrying staves on his back, his burden about to break him. He takes out his unhappiness on others. He resents spirituality and goodness in others and is to be pitied and not feared.”
“You think that’s the man I met this morning?”
“Yes, I do. So I’ll put him back in the deck and leave him to his fate.”
I thought we were finished. But Mrs. Ludiki, like all people who toy with the delicate membrane that holds the soul together, had unlocked doors that my mother never should have walked through.
“Who is the figure tied upside down on the tree?” my mother asked.
“That’s the Hanged Man.” Mrs. Ludiki tried to pick up the card and replace it in the deck before the conversation went further.
“That’s the death card, isn’t it?” my mother asked. She pressed her finger on the edge of the card.
“The Hanged Man is Saint Sebastian, the first martyr of Rome. He was a soldier executed by his fellow soldiers.”
My mother studied the card carefully. The figure was pale-bodied and effeminate, covered only by a loincloth. “He bears a resemblance to Aaron. Look. It’s uncanny.”
“No, we mustn’t transfer the wrong meaning from this card, Mrs. Broussard.”
“Are those arrows?”
“They’re darts. The Legionnaires fired darts from their crossbows.”
“What’s the next card in the deck?”
“I don’t know. Let’s move on and look at these other things in our wheel,” Mrs. Ludiki said, her eyes veiled. “There is certainly prosperity here. Good health as well. Yes, there are very positive indicators working in your life.”
“No, the Hanged Man is at the apex of the wheel. When there is an ambiguity in the card, you always supplement it with another. Please show me
the next card, Mrs. Ludiki.”
Mrs. Ludiki turned over the top card on the deck and placed it below the Hanged Man. It showed a skeleton wearing black armor and riding a white horse.
“That’s the Fourth Horseman of the Book of Revelation,” my mother said.
“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Ludiki said.
“Death?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” my mother said. She stood up, groping in her purse. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I forgot how much our session is. I’m sorry. It’s a dollar seventy—”
“There’s no charge today,” Mrs. Ludiki said. “I’m happy to see you. Please don’t take away the wrong ideas from the tarot.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re correct,” my mother said. “It’s been an unusual day. I must be running. Aaron, say goodbye to Mrs. Ludiki.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Ludiki.”
Her eyes couldn’t meet ours. She rose from her chair, a basically good woman wreathed in scarfs and tinkling jewelry and fumes from her candles and incense bowls, unable to dispel the misery she had helped fuel.
Outside, I took my mother’s arm, then opened the car door for her. “Would you like to go for a drive? Maybe to a show?”
“No, I don’t feel well. Thank you anyway, Aaron. He looked like you. You saw the resemblance, didn’t you?”
“The Hanged Man? Not a chance, Mother. That guy looks like the ninety-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face in the Charles Atlas ad.”
Her face blanched. Could I have chosen a worse metaphor? Nope. I had found the absolute worst.
I drove my mother to a soda shop and bought her a lime Coke. I thought I heard a clock ticking inside my head. I don’t think the sound was imaginary.
Chapter
30
MY ANXIETY HAD become almost as bad as my mother’s. I called Valerie. “I have to talk to your father,” I said.
“He’s at his club.”
“What club?”
“The one he hangs out at by the driving range. What is wrong with you, Aaron?”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Is it about yesterday?” she said. “About not wanting to do it?”
“No, I understood perfectly,” I said. “Don’t worry about a thing. Not for one minute.”
“So why do you want to talk to my father?”
“Because I don’t like all this secrecy crap.”
“Come by the house and I’ll go with you.”
“No, I need to talk to him on a personal level.”
“You feel you’re doing something wrong?”
“I feel like we’re slipping around.”
“My father treats me like a grown woman. I don’t keep secrets from him.”
“But he does,” I said.
“What?”
“I always have to guess at what he’s talking about. He’s always indicating that he knows something he’s not sharing.”
She gave me the address of his club, then asked if I would be by later.
“If you’d like me to,” I said.
“What do you think?” she replied.
THE DRIVING RANGE was in a semi-rural part of Houston where urbanization had not had its way. The late nineteenth century was still visible, including pastureland and clumps of live oaks wilting in a savannah and a general store and saloon with a wide gallery that had barrels of pecans on it in the season. Mr. Epstein’s “club” was a former American Legion bar now owned collectively, mostly by men who had served in World War II. It was dark and cool inside and smelled of tap beer and cheese and heavily seasoned smoked meats. The ceiling was made of stamped tin and hung with wood-bladed fans. The bartender told me Mr. Epstein was in the men’s room and that I could wait at the bar and have a soft drink if I wanted.
It was a strange setting, a hybrid one that seemed disconnected from the Texas where I had grown up. There were newspapers printed in Hebrew attached to poles along one wall, and tables for dominoes and cards and chess games, and a long glass case filled with athletic trophies, an inflatable flight vest, a Flying Tiger jacket, a photo of the Times Square celebration on V-J Day, an Israeli flag, a shot of French paratroopers coming down in a rice paddy.
One photo reached out to me like a fist in the face. Six men dressed in military fatigues without insignias, all of them bearded and wearing flop hats, stood with their arms over one another’s shoulders in front of a burned tank, a sand dune in the background. The man in the center was Mr. Epstein. The man next to him was either a look-alike or in reality someone I had hoped I would never see again, even in a photo. At the bottom, someone had written “Palestine, 1947.”
I felt rather than saw Mr. Epstein standing behind me.
“Valerie called and said you were on your way,” he said. “Want to sit down in a quiet corner?”
“Is that you in the photograph?” I tried to smile.
He squinted at the glass case. “That’s me.”
“You were in the Israeli-Palestinian war?”
“I popped in and out a couple of times. Nothing to write home about.”
“The man next to you looks like my metal-shop teacher.”
“Yeah, that’s old Krauser. He was quite a character.” Mr. Epstein sat in a booth and waited for me to sit down across from him, his attention occupied with everything in the room except me. “What’s on your mind?”
I tried to suppress the vague sense of resentment I always felt around Mr. Epstein; he seemed to suggest that others were supposed to adjust to his perception of the world, his experience, his knowledge.
“Mr. Krauser was one of the worst people I ever knew,” I said.
“He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”
“He was OSS?”
“For a while.”
“In my opinion, he should have been on the other side.”
“With the Krauts?”
“No, with the Nazis,” I said.
“What do you know about Nazis?”
“They’re bullies. Like Krauser. They feed on the weak.”
“Nazi scientists built our intercontinental missiles,” he said.
He went into a digression about Operation Paperclip and the missile program in Redstone, Alabama, his gaze roving around the room. Then he stopped and picked at his hands as though he had given me more time than he’d intended.
“Mr. Epstein, Valerie said you went off somewhere with a grease gun and then came home and said, ‘All this is going to pass.’ What is ‘all this,’ sir?”
“I talked with a couple of people.” He paused to see if his meaning had settled in. “I mean I ‘talked’ with them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“People who work for the Atlas family?”
“I didn’t say who they worked for.”
“You ‘talked’ to them in a way they won’t forget?”
“They’re not interested in you. They’re after the Harrelson money. Stay out of their business and they’ll stay out of yours. You also need to stay away from Grady Harrelson. Do that and all this will pass. It’s not a complicated idea.”
“I’m not in their business. I never wanted to be around Grady. He was abusing Valerie at a Galveston drive-in. That’s how I got involved with him.”
“I’m trying to tell you about the world you’ve stumbled into, son.”
“How do you know these people, sir?”
“I know them. What difference does it make?”
“Valerie told me why the government let Lucky Luciano out of jail.”
“Yes?” he replied, folding his hands.
“So Luciano could keep the shipyard workers broke. That’s how you know these guys? You or your friends worked with the Mafia?”
He told the waiter to bring us two Nesbitt’s oranges.
“Why don’t you answer the question, Mr. Epstein?” I said.
“Luciano was let out of jail to stop espionage on the docks.”
“I read there was no espionage. Luciano ordered a ship burned so hi
s people could get him released and transformed into a patriot. He introduced heroin to the Negro slums. He murdered people for two decades.”
Mr. Epstein leaned forward, his brow knurled. His skin was dark, his hair like a curly gold wig, his pale blue eyes as mirthless as ice at the bottom of a cocktail glass. “Deal with the world in kind or be its victim, son. But you won’t take my daughter down with you.”
“Krauser called me that.”
“Called you what?”
“Son.”
“I’m not getting your point.”
“It was an insult,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“I think all this stuff you’ve told me sucks pipe, Mr. Epstein.”
“Sucks pipe? I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”
The waiter put down our drinks. Mr. Epstein watched him walk away, then his gaze moved back to my face. “Merton Jenks showed you photos of the two men who poured gasoline on Valerie?”
“Yes. They were naked. Their hands were gone.”
“But they had it coming, didn’t they?”
“I can’t make that kind of judgment.”
“You’re still not hearing me. I’m saying they made a mistake.”
I could feel my mouth drying out. Under the table, I kept clenching my thighs with my hands, unsure whether I was more scared than angry. “I don’t know if I want to hear more. Who would cut off a man’s hands?”
“That’s the world you walked into. That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
“You may not have that choice,” he said.
“I asked Valerie to run away. I suspect we’ll get married one day. Nobody is going to run me off, Mr. Epstein.”
“I’m not trying to run you off. Valerie’s choice is Valerie’s choice. I’m telling you to be careful. You’re not a listener.”
“No, sir, you’re threatening me.”
He opened a penknife and began cleaning his nails. “Drink your orange.”
“Drink it yourself,” I said.
I got up from the booth and walked outside into the wind. Across the street, men and women and teenagers whacked golf balls high into a sky marbled with crimson-tinted thunderheads, the balls dropping and bouncing like hailstones on a green carpet that once was a feeder lot. I heard the screen door of Mr. Epstein’s club swing back into place behind me.